We are offering grief counseling to our staff to ensure they are supported during this time.

"We take this situation very seriously and we're working to investigate everything that happened so we could prevent anything like this from happening again", he said, according to CNN.

Dr Kyle Burks, the zoo's managing director: "These are our family and we have had such a great response on social media, from people sharing how they feel for our team and I can't say how much we appreciate that". A similar animal escaped its enclosure Saturday at a zoo in New Orleans. In 2001, a 70-pound cub named Mulac got loose for about 10 minutes before he was brought down with a tranquilizer dart. No animals or humans were injured in that escape.